The global video gaming market is experiencing explosive growth. Competition is intense, and so to differentiate services and engage users, progressive gaming companies such as Big Fish are seeking solutions to more fully personalize the customer experience.

Using Business Intelligence (BI) and predictive analytics Big Fish can segment customers based on a range of demographic and behavioural indicators. This enables Big Fish to serve highly targeted recommendations and marketing, precisely personalized to a user's individual preferences.

Big Fish's Marketing Management Service platform, powered by MySQL Cluster, is used across all of the company's customer management systems, including customer support and the company's "Game Manager", to provide a unique customer experience to each of its millions of monthly users whenever they come in contact with Big Fish.

TECHNOLOGY SELECTION

Big Fish already has an extensive deployment of MySQL databases powering web applications, including the storefront. They knew MySQL could power the recommendations database, but would require additional engineering efforts to implement database sharding to support data ingest and future scaling needs, coupled with a Memcached layer for low-latency reads.

As a result, they began evaluations of MySQL Cluster, in addition to other database technologies. Using MySQL Cluster, the Engineering teams were able to leverage their existing MySQL skills, enabling them to reduce operational complexity when compared to introducing a new database to the Big Fish environment.

At the same time, they knew MySQL Cluster, backed by Oracle, provided the long-term investment protection they needed for the MMS recommendations platform.

Through their evaluation, the Big Fish engineering team identified MySQL Cluster was best able to meet their technical requirements, based on:

Write performance to support high velocity data ingest

Low latency access with in-memory tables

On-line scalability, adding nodes to a running cluster

Continuous availability with its shared-nothing architecture

SQL and NoSQL APIs to the cluster supporting both fast data loading and complex queries

PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION

As illustrated in the figure below:

User data is replicated from the MySQL databases powering the gaming storefront to the Big Fish BI platform;